


colder than this

by flowermasters



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: (literally only pre-canon from echo's perspective lmao), Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Childhood Trauma, Echo Appreciation Week, Gen, Grounder Culture, Medical Torture, Minor Original Character(s), Mount Weather, Pre-Canon, a literal dash of bellamy blake, echo whump tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-14
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-23 09:31:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16616390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowermasters/pseuds/flowermasters
Summary: I’m going to die, Echo thinks every now and then, usually after long stretches where she doesn’t think at all.





	colder than this

**Author's Note:**

> So, once upon a time I planned to write something for every day of Echo Week, but--school happened. Here's my post for day 2, pre-canon.
> 
> Anyway. I wanted to explore Echo's trauma wrt Mount Weather because nothing will convince me my girl made it out of there without some PTSD. I love her bunches and sometimes we hurt the ones we love.
> 
> Warnings: canon-typical depictions of violence (y'all saw season 2), lots of discussion of death, medical violence, references to past child abuse (at least from a modern perspective--not so much from Echo's.)

When the _Ripas_ take her, Echo knows she’s going to die. Deep in what was once Trikru land, now Skaikru’s, too close to the no-man’s-land around the Mountain, they take her. She smells the rot on their breath and she knows what that means, knows that she will be carried, screaming, clawing, to her death. She isn’t given the chance to scream, much less to claw, for her life; one of them hits her over the head with something hard and that is it.

Then it isn’t: she wakes up falling, but not from very high—just from someone’s arms to the floor. Cold, hard floor, and when she rolls onto her back, winded from the impact, all she can see with her blurry vision is light above her. The light makes her think she must be dying, but it isn’t the sun; it is somehow as cold and hard as the floor below.

A shadow appears, larger somehow than any man she’s ever faced, and when she lunges up at him, scratching, teeth bared, the pain begins in earnest.

She is still very much alive.

* * *

It seems as though she sleeps for a long while after that.

It’s not normal sleep; the feeling reminds Echo of when she was young, still in training for the Royal Guard. Novitiates were drugged on occasion as part of their training—with jobi nuts, herbs, bittersweet smoke—to strengthen their endurance and tolerance. Echo lost consciousness a few times, but she was always able to complete her task—solving a puzzle, freeing herself from a trap, fighting off an opponent—when she woke. After the first few times, she never faltered, even when she couldn’t see straight and could barely walk.

This feels like that—moments, maybe seconds, of consciousness followed by periods when she cannot open her eyes or move her body—but it feels worse for longer than jobi nuts or herbs ever did. When she closes her eyes, she remembers inhaling smoke, taking the handle of a knife even as her vision warped, the blade bending before her eyes. When she opens her eyes, she sees only harsh light and glinting metal. She is unsure now if she’s dying or not.

She was praised for her endurance when she was young. _To be made weak is to dishonor our people,_ her teacher said. _To dishonor Azgeda is worse than death. But you are not weak._

_Sha, seda,_ Echo had answered, half-blind, hiding her shaking hands. _I will not dishonor our people._

* * *

She pulls slowly out of a sleepy period only to find that she still cannot move.

She can’t unfold her limbs, though her position is uncomfortable; there is metal in the way. When she tries to stretch her legs, her bare foot connects painfully with what feels like a grate. She opens her eyes. Not a grate: a cage door.

She moves sluggishly but immediately, searching the space with her fingers and her eyes. She is in a cage surrounded by cages. There’s someone below her—she cannot see their face because their head droops forward towards their chest. There are cages across an open space in front of her. Everyone across from her is asleep, too, their faces tucked away or even in plain sight, openly vulnerable. They’re all barely more than naked; Echo, like the others, is only minimally covered with bandages. The crook of her elbow is badly sore. There’s a bandage there, too, but this one is bloodstained.

The woman in the cage to Echo’s left looks to be unconscious, too, or maybe dead, but her body faces Echo. Her dark skin is an ashen gray under the odd bluish light; her lips are chapped and split in places. She bears Trikru’s marks. Echo reaches out and shakes the bars between their cages with her hand. “ _Kaina skafa dison bilaik_?” she breathes. _What kind of hell is this?_

“You are in the Mountain,” the woman answers in kind, without opening her eyes. “Don’t fight it.”

Echo sinks back at the rasp of death, away from the left side of the cage. There is no cage to the right of her, only a large open space where bodies—human bodies—hang from the ceiling, upside-down like livestock about to be drained. Echo does not speak to the woman again, sensing—with the bit of her rational mind that has not been consumed by animal terror—that there isn’t much point in bothering her now.

* * *

Echo has no way to gauge the passage of time. The only thing that lets her know that hours, if not days, have passed since she was brought here is the weakness she feels from hunger and thirst. The bodies hanging from the ceiling do not move. The monotonous horror is broken only when something nearby lets out a strange tone before a door opens, the sound booming in the relative quiet. At once, any murmurs, any movements in the cages, cease.

Eight men in matching clothing enter; two of them push metal carts laden with small, identical cups. Echo watches as two of the men approach her row of cages while the others move past them, continuing further into the cavern. Echo has no idea where they are or how many cages there are, but the space is large enough for distant voices to echo.

Thus begins what Echo will come to recognize as a ritual. They are pulled from their cages one by one—Echo’s body is too weak to cooperate when she tries to resist, but others are stuck in the arm with something that makes them turn sluggish and cooperative—and taken to a dark, cramped room to relieve themselves. Then they’re put back into their cages and given cups of flavorless paste. When the guards make a second pass moments later, the cups are taken away.

Echo thinks of throwing her cup at the approaching guard’s face when he opens the cage door, but he shoves something long and thin through the bars as soon she raises her arm. She doesn’t have time to see what it is before it hurts her worse than anything she’s ever felt. The pain comes so fast and so blinding that when she is able to think again, he’s already opened the door and taken the cup away. She only succeeded in slopping most of the gruel on herself.

As she regains her breath, Echo watches as the guards regroup and begin taking the bodies from the ceiling. They drag one body out of Echo’s line of sight. The other is dragged down the corridor, deeper into the rows of cages. Echo is not sure if either body is alive. Then, calmly, their movements purposeful, the guards leave.

The woman to her left is watching her with dull eyes. “Why do they do this?” Echo asks. The others have begun to murmur again, a nervous buzz of energy filling the room, but Echo keeps her voice low out of habit. “Why keep us alive?”

“They want our bodies,” the woman says. Every word sounds as though it costs her; she can barely hold her head up. Echo wonders if she is as old as she looks—old enough to be Echo’s mother, at least—or if this place has sucked her years away. “As long as they can have them. But they will kill us, sooner or later.”

Echo nods to show that she has heard, but it is a hollow gesture. She acknowledges without true understanding, without feeling. She knew that much already.

Distantly, she realizes that this is the first _us_ she has ever been a part of outside of her clan. Fitting that it’s a sign that her last days have come.

* * *

The paste the guards give brings back some of her strength each time, but never enough to resist when they pull her from the cage. The guards are always men, large men with batons, and they always outnumber her. They don’t speak unless they need to grunt commands; Echo would wager most in the cages do not understand well enough to obey, but a prod with the buzzing stick does the trick every time.   

Waking and sleeping hours blur so much that she sometimes can’t tell if she has really been asleep unless she has dreamed. She dreams often of the _haiplana_. She dreams of completing her mission.

_You know what to do_ , Queen Nia said before she left, dismissing Echo to Skaikru territory with a wave of her hand. Echo did exactly as commanded—up until she failed to return.

She dreams of telling the queen everything—Skaikru’s numbers, the health and skill of their people, the number of weapons. Even in her dreams, something isn’t quite right—something can’t be accounted for. She’s completed her mission, but she’s been gone for far too long.

Queen Nia touches Echo’s cheek in the dream the way she had once when Echo was very small—too small for swordfighting, only good enough to watch and learn as others attended the queen. The queen was young then, too, and touched Echo’s cheek when Echo brought her a cup of wine after her meal without needing to be told. _Smart girl_ , the _haiplana_ said then. _Always watching_.

_Smart girl_ , Nia says now. _But where are you?_

* * *

Every day new bodies are hung from the ceiling. Echo watches as they are dragged past, then poked with needles and tubes and strung up like dead pigs just a few feet away from her cage. She can watch the blood draining from their bodies, taken for purposes unknown.

The woman in the cage beside her seems to have regained some of her strength, albeit not much. She’s still weak, still hardly able to move, not that she could anyway. Her skin hangs loose; this much, though, Echo sympathizes with. Her own ribs are already beginning to protrude after only five feeding rituals. Echo knows the woman’s strength is returning only because she begins to speak without prompting.

“They'll bleed me again soon,” the woman muses. “They always do once you regain your strength. Have they bled you yet, girl?”

“No,” Echo says, looking askance at her. She resents the reminder that they will, not that she can be free of reminders when the bodies hang just feet away. “I’m no one’s girl.”

The woman sniffs as though amused. “Stuck-up,” she says, in her slightly wheezy way. “You talk in your sleep.”

Echo takes this odd response for what it is, a reminder that they are all equally _less than_ here. Not less than in age or rank or _kru_ as they would be outside the Mountain; in here they are less than animals. At least animals are killed before they’re consumed.

“You should save your strength,” Echo says, offering a reminder of her own: _you’re dying_ , _not me. Not yet._

“As should you,” says the old woman.

* * *

The first time they bleed her, Echo knows she’s going to die.

As best she can tell, the guards pick their victims at random, and this time it seems she has run out of luck. One of the guards looks at her, and that’s what gives it away. The guards never look at their faces.

They pull her from the cage by her thrashing legs; she grabs hold of the bars, but one of them has already stuck her in the thigh with his needle, and the lethargy from their poison spreads quickly through her veins. She falls to her knees briefly before a guard wrenches her back up and begins dragging her towards the front of the room, where the bodies hang. Throughout this, she remains oddly conscious of the others in the cages, watching her now as she has watched so many others—safe for just a little longer, and glad for it.

She’s not awake when they hang her from the ceiling, so she doesn’t have to suffer that final indignity. There are vague, disorienting bursts of sensation in the blackness, namely the feeling of her blood draining from her even as what’s left of it pools in her head, the pressure mounting until it feels as though her skull will crack open.

Still, Echo wakes in the cage.

Her head aches; her vision is foggy, and she blinks a few times, trying to clear it. She’s cold. She must make a sound, because someone shushes her. “Quiet,” says the woman in the next cage, but not unkindly. “The worst will pass soon enough.”

Echo tips her head forward to let it rest against the nearest set of bars; she’s too disoriented to tell up from down. The woman murmurs something else, her voice low and even, but Echo can’t hear the words.

* * *

The queen’s touch on her cheek is tender, tenderer even than when Echo was a child.

_Brave girl_ , Nia says. _But look where it got you._

* * *

When Echo is able to hold her head up again, she finds herself covered in bruises, presumably from her brief scuffle with the guards.

“You gave them a good show,” the woman says as Echo gently palpates a sore spot at the top of her head. Echo can see her watching out of the corner of her eye. “I wouldn’t do it again.”

“You said it yourself,” Echo says flatly. “They’re going to kill me anyways.”

“Fair enough,” the woman says. “But they can make the end of your life even worse than this.” She lifts her hand vaguely in a gesture that seems to indicate the cages, but Echo knows what she means. With their drugs and batons and the Skaikru weapons they wear at the hip, the guards have a plethora of torture devices at their disposal.

“I won’t make it easy for them,” Echo says, dropping her hand from her head. She holds her gaze straight ahead. The man in the cage under her shifts, moaning in discomfort. Echo ignores him. “If they kill me quicker, then so be it.”

“You’re brave—and proud,” the woman says, then coughs. When she recovers herself, she adds, “But even you must fear death.”

Echo feels her lip curl involuntarily. “I don’t fear death.” _I was raised not to_ , she almost adds. _It was bred out of me._

It doesn’t matter if the old woman understands; nothing matters now, after all.

“Anyone would fear this death,” the woman says. Even Echo can’t bring herself to disagree with that.

* * *

The guards don’t give her any trouble over the next few days, but she’s also too weak to pose much of a threat. She spends what must be days sitting largely in silence, her legs tucked to her chest, arms wrapped loosely around herself. The woman next door leaves her alone for the most part, perhaps aware that her efforts to brace Echo for the reality of her situation are neither welcome nor necessary.

_I’m going to die_ , Echo thinks every now and then, usually after long stretches where she doesn’t think at all. The monotony of waiting for death is interrupted by the fear of what will happen when the waiting stops. She feels the tightness in her chest, the shortness of her breath and knows that the woman was right and Nia was wrong—she is not smarter or braver than anyone here, because she is going to die just like the rest of them, and she is afraid.

The woman’s hacking cough startles Echo from bouts of restless sleep. When she’s awake, she can usually hear the man below her shifting fitfully about, rattling the metal of the cages. Sometimes he groans and occasionally he even cries out. Never when the guards are around, of course—then he’s as quiet as a mouse, huddled in the back corner of his cage.

_We’re all in pain_ , Echo thinks of telling him. _I hurt. You don’t hear me crying like a child._

When his sobbing pulls her from her thoughts once more, Echo slams her fist down on the bottom of the cage without thinking, causing the entire row to rattle loudly. Pain radiates up her arm, but she ignores it; a hush falls in the area as the usual low hum of conversation and crying ceases momentarily. Echo ignores this, too. “ _Shof op_ ,” she says, looking down at him through the bars. “Enough of your wailing.”

He doesn’t look up, and he doesn’t stop crying, but his sobs take on the frightened quality of a child’s. Something about that—and what she can see of him, shoulders hunched and hands pressed tightly to his mouth to muffle himself—makes Echo’s eyes sting. She has to stare directly ahead until the moisture dries, keeping her lips pressed tightly together until whatever noise she might make recedes back into the depths of her.

She does not offer him comfort, but she doesn’t ask the man below to be quiet again.

* * *

Echo rarely dreamed of her first seda before the Mountain. To be fair, she’s not sure she dreamed much at all before the Mountain.

He, Tioch, forms the basis of many of her earliest memories. She was brought to Nia’s court as an infant after her mother died. Then her father, a member of Queen Nia’s guard, died in a skirmish with Trikru not long after, and Echo was left to the care of the queen’s servants. When she was old enough to walk and talk, she was given to Tioch to begin her training.

She can’t remember a time when she was not in training for the Guard. She remembers faceless maids, Tioch, the queen, and the prince; they were her world then. Though her sense of the world has grown in the years since, the royal family has remained the focal point of _her_ world.

In her dreams of Tioch she is sometimes a child and sometimes an adult. Appearing as a child makes sense, as Tioch died when she was still young. He was the first person she ever saw face death—and he did not die a gruesome, bloody death, but a slow one, from a wound that would not heal.

In her dreams he’s not dying, although she’s somehow aware in the dreams that he _will_ die. In her dreams they’re always sparring.

She was one of Tioch’s youngest students, but she was also always among the best. Even when she feels like an adult in the dreams, she makes the occasional clumsy mistake, and Tioch reproaches her. She is ashamed but doesn’t stop fighting; she never did, even when she was young.

The dream always ends the same way. She kneels on the sparring mat, head bowed respectfully as she waits for instruction; Tioch stands before her, telling her what she must learn, what she must do to survive. He is already holding the spot at his ribs that will kill him.

* * *

The laziest of guards is on duty; he picks from the first rows of cages with greater frequency than the others, although Echo has still been unable to detect a pattern to whom they choose. He gives Echo a preemptive prod with the stick before even opening the cage door. As he drags her from the cage, she’s conscious enough to see, in a blur of movement and limbs, another guard opening the door to the cage next to hers. She feels the pinch in the muscle of her upper arm. She doesn’t even have time to think of dying.

She wakes up in the cage. At some point she must have thrown up, can tell by the sour taste of bile in her mouth, but someone must have cleaned any mess off her. Maybe they sprayed her with water as they had when they brought her here, and she was too helpless to even wake up.

It takes a few moments before she’s able to open her eyes. Even the dim, bluish light from above hurts. She shifts weakly, relieving pressure on the parts of her body that have been still for too long. What she wouldn’t give for a blanket. A cup of water. The desire for food is momentarily so strong that it blends with the nausea she already feels and turns into a sense of revulsion; her stomach feels as though it is turning in on itself.

She breathes through it during periods of wakefulness as her body tries to remember how to keep her alive. _Quiet_ , she remembers during one such period. _The worst will pass soon enough._

When she opens her eyes, the cage next to hers is empty.

* * *

 

They don’t fill the cage immediately. Echo wishes they would, though she’s wanted to be left alone from the very beginning. The empty cage is a fly buzzing in Echo’s ear, a nagging reminder of death that never leaves her peripheral vision.

The man below doesn’t stop crying, but Echo can no longer bring herself to feel any particular way about it. She can muster neither irritation nor pity for him, nor pity for herself. All she can manage for the woman, nameless and dead, is _yu gonplei ste odon_. _Gonplei_ it was, for all the woman’s warnings to Echo about accepting her fate; to be so resilient here is to fight. It’s the most Echo can do anymore—just staying alive for as long as possible, more out of habit than desire.  

The guards leave her alone for several days—weeks?—but she continues to feign weakness even after she regains the ability to hold up her head. She watches, head lowered and eyes half-closed, as the guards pass her by again and again. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches them hang the bodies up and then drag the corpses away. Weak as the sentiment makes her feel, cowardly even, she is glad not to have seen the woman when they took her away.

* * *

She continues to sleep a great deal, too sick to do much else. She stops opening her eyes even when she wakes, even when the guards have left and she doesn’t need to keep up a façade. After a while, it stops feeling like a façade at all.

The old woman doesn’t join her dreams in physical form, but her voice is there, as always, nagging. Trying to soothe.

_The worst will pass soon enough._

_Brave girl._

_To be made weak is to dishonor Azgeda. But you are not weak._

She believes them when she sleeps. She’s reminded of the illusion every time a sound pulls her to consciousness—the tones that signal the guards’ entrance, a scream or cry from somewhere in the distance. Something pulls at her now, metal rattling, lightly at first. She resists wakefulness, but the sound only gets louder, more insistent.

Someone is shaking the cages down.


End file.
